Definitions for doublethink

the acceptance of two contradictory ideas or beliefs at the same time.

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Citations for doublethink

Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies ...George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four, 1949

It does require a fairly dystopian strain of doublethink for a company to celebrate how hard and how constantly its employees must work to make a living, given that these companies are themselves setting the terms.Jia Tolentino, "The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death," The New Yorker, March 22, 2017

Origin of doublethink

Doublesthink comes from George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-four (also 1984), published in 1949. It appears alongside Orwell’s other neologisms thoughtcrime and duckspeak. Doublethink, has a more sinister meaning than the relatively innocuous doubletalk, which appeared in the late 1930s and referred at first to the kind of speech that Casey Stengel (1891–1975) was famous for, and later to jargon or pompous language. Doublethink entered English in the second half of the 20th century.